To be pedantic, the correct URL is technically https://mail.google.com/mail/h/, which then expands in practice to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ and then gets the jumble of characters near the end added on which appears to be an everything-compliant cache-busting mechanism. When typing the URL manually the "/" after the "h" is required; "mail.google.com/mail/h" will not work.

You can also use https://mail.google.com/?ui=html

Initially it takes me to a page that asks, "Do you really want to use HTML Gmail?" I need to click "I'd like to use HTML Gmail" button to proceed to HTML Gmail.

Wow, it's insanely fast. Incredible.

The fact is the normal view used to be very fast even on the hardware of the era. Nowadays normal view has the same functionalities but is much slower even on modern hardware.

My gmail was great on my commodity 2010 Windows laptop until a couple of months ago, and then it suddenly fell off a cliff. I've tried everything I can think of, but I think Google just messed something up and made it at least an order of magnitude slower quite recently.

I used basic view for a while, and didn't miss any of the advanced features. What made me stop was the fact it inserts newlines into messages to keep lines below 70 characters. (I guess this is in line with the RFC, but my recipients didn't like it.)

They're doing their best to kill it. Last time I checked, they stopped honoring the setting that used to allow you to permanently switch views. Now they always use the default slow view unless you use a specific URL.

In my experience, that's the only sane way to use it even on modern hardware.